


what am I supposed to do (if there's no you)

by muppetstiefel



Series: drabbles [3]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, I Love Patricia Blum Uris, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Richie & Patty Comfort Each Other, Richie Tozier & Patricia Blum Uris Friendship, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:15:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23019166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muppetstiefel/pseuds/muppetstiefel
Summary: "“You okay?” Richie whispers, though there’s no one else around to hear the words.Patty shrugs pathetically. The movement feels heavy, like some weight is pushing her, further and further down. “It’s Valentine’s day,” she whispers back, eyes still fixed to Richie’s, as though daring him to look away."
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Richie Tozier & Patricia Blum Uris, Richie Tozier/Patricia Blum Uris
Series: drabbles [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1473572
Comments: 3
Kudos: 48





	what am I supposed to do (if there's no you)

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags!! There's lots of grieving in this fic, so please be careful!! I've tried to represent grieving accurately, and do Patty some justice, so it's not going to be pretty!!

The house is silent at three in the morning. A thick, dark silence which coats the walls and the floors, snatching away airy breaths and making thoughts seem colder, clinical and contrasting when thought.

Patty doesn’t know why she’s awake. Normally now, she sleeps through the night, in bed at ten and up at six, regular as clockwork. Before, she would fall asleep in the early hours of the morning and only rise to get ready for work. In the absence of work, she could sleep well into the afternoon, or until roused by someone. That’s what grief does to some, she supposes. It makes them regular as clockwork.

She can’t sleep now. She’s awake, and so is her brain, tumbling and flipping. It’s cold in the room, the mattress freezing her side as she twists to reach through the fuzzy darkness for her phone. She sleeps with it beside her now, not that she knows why. It’s not like he’s going to call.

The screen blares arbitrary numbers, but she already knew it was too early for humans to be awake. The only people conscious now will be rising to feed babies, or tumbling in from a night out. She tries not to think of the lovers who might be awake, too, rolling over one another, breath hot and sticky in the damp of the night.

She could curl in on herself and try to sleep again, or at least lie awake alone, under the ocean of the duvet, which is wrapped tightly around her body. Or she could get up and go out, for a run, to clear her mind. She knows that’s a stupid idea – would probably get her murdered – but it’s too early for thinking, and she likes running. So she gets up.

She’s half-way through changing into her running gear when the fatigue hits her with full force. It’s not because of the early hours, though she is still bleary-eyed. It’s a bone aching tired which drives into her and leaves her dizzy. She wants to crawl back into bed and sleep forever. But she’s awake, and her mind is buzzing, and there’s a dull static buzz in the pit of her stomach. She knows what she needs, really. She needs his arms, tight and harbouring around her neck, holding her together. But he’s not there.

Instead, she pads down the corridor of the too cold house, slipper-clad feet muffling her footsteps. The door is already open when she gets there – it’s always left open in invitation – so she slips through and into the thick folds of darkness.

He’s awake. They’ve been living together long enough for Patty to know how he sounds asleep, complete with his choking breaths and throaty snores. The air is stagnant, though, and quiet, which means he’s awake.

She folds her feet over one another with a sudden shyness. She’s half in her pyjamas, but she’s wearing her running leggings too, and she feels exposed, and vulnerable.

He turns on his side to face her, squinting up, nose crinkled slightly. He looks so denably like Stan in that moment, that she nearly crawls next to him and presses their lips together with a deep desperation.

It’s not Stan, she forces herself to remember, it’s Richie. Richie, who moved in three months ago for ‘a little while’ and hasn’t moved out since. Richie, whose heart holds double the grief and who shows half of the aching.

“Pat?” he mumbles, words slurred with sleep.

She doesn’t answer, instead reaching for the edge of the quilt and clambering under. For a minute, she wants to raise it over her head and suffocate herself, until she’s choking, but she doesn’t, dropping it around her neck and curling on her side to face him.

Up close, his skin is more worn, crinkled and curling at the edges, and his sleepy smile strains at his mouth, like a sob is working its way up under it. Without his glasses, his eyes shine a little more, something in them absent.

She reaches up to brush a hair out of his eyes. He hasn’t cut it since he’s been staying with her – hasn’t left the house yet – and it’s starting to obstruct his vision. Not that his vision isn’t absolutely fucked anyway. That’s what the glasses are for, sat dejected on the bedside table. Patty cant let herself look at them. Just another reminder of the unattainable.

“You okay?” Richie whispers, though there’s no one else around to hear the words.

Patty shrugs pathetically. The movement feels heavy, like some weight is pushing her down, further and further down. “It’s Valentine’s day,” she whispers back, eyes still fixed to Richie’s, as though daring him to look away.

He doesn’t. Instead, he reaches out for her shoulder and pulls it to it connects with his, arms snaking their way around her shoulders and pressing her body close to his. She buries her face in his shoulder, inhales. They only touch like this in darkness, two clumsy strangers trying to remember what affection feels like. In daylight, they maintain their distance, respectable. Their adults, after all. Patty didn’t even know of Richie’s existence until four months ago. She doesn’t think about four months ago.

Now, however, she’s a child, clinging to his embrace, desperate hands clutching at the back of his stained t-shirt – he only brought so many. He didn’t plan to stay so long.

* * *

Patty doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she remembers waking up. The curtain is twitched back a little, the morning glare of watery sunlight stinging her eyes. It’s too much, too bright and too alive, but her bones ache and she doesn’t want to get up. Instead, she drags the quilt over her nose and rolls over to bury her face in the pillow.

When she wakes again, Richie is gone, quilt thrown back, mattress cold against the flat of her palm which she presses against it. She reaches for her phone, but it’s not there, still sat discarded in her own room. Her heart pangs at its absence, the fear of missing him gripping at her stomach, but it’s all in vain. He won’t call. He’ll never call again. His voice, his words, are just more things lost to mortality.

Once, she didn’t answer when he called her and he threw away the casserole she was saving. She’d been so mad at the time, even though it was her own fault. If she’d just answered, he wouldn’t have thrown it out.

If she’d just answered – just listened – he’d still be here.

She heaves herself up, body refusing to keep up with her mind as she trudges back down to her room, and retrieves the phone from next to her sports bra which sits in a heap on the floor. She clicks the screen and it flashes to life. The picture on her screen used to be her and Stan, when visiting her parents, both drinking wine and laughing at something her mom had said. She stared at that picture so much in the weeks after that the wine had become blood, dripping through the screen and onto her hands. She changed it to a picture of a sunset she found on google.

There are a few messages, mainly from her family and friends, all the same template. ‘We’re here if you need to talk’. They all said that, in the weeks after. Patty couldn’t tell them that she didn’t want to talk, that if she opened her mouth she would be scared of what would come out. Her thoughts are too tinted to be shared, to childhood friends and nosy aunts, so she keeps them inside, until they shrivel and die, alongside everything else she touches.

Richie doesn’t ask to talk. Richie just listens, when she drinks too much wine and can’t stop what comes out. And after he holds her while she cries.

She finds him downstairs. He’s starting up the coffee machine, the only appliance in the kitchen that is used anymore. Patty used to love to cook, used to love letting the smells calm her when her nerves felt particularly fried. The first time she tried to cook for her and Richie, she nearly burnt her hand. She’s stayed away from the stove since.

He holds up a mug in a silent, questioning gesture, brow crinkling. She nods in return, reaching for the fridge and passing him the carton of milk.

He looks harsher in the light; dark bags dripping around his eyes, stubble covering his chin, hands shaking as he reaches for the percolator. If it were night time, Patty would reach up and try to scrub away the unease with the pads of her thumbs, but it’s day time, so she hauls herself onto the kitchen counter instead, a respectable distance apart.

“What do you want to do today?” His voice snaps at the effort, the edges tight. He always asks the same question, always unnervingly gentle. Mostly, Patty wants to do nothing. Sometimes there are good days, when she wants to paint, or run, or drive and drive and drive.

Today, she shrugs. She feels an endless emptiness settling at the pit of her stomach, which is stupid. It’s only Valentine’s day, a day she and Stan never acknowledged. They had plenty of special days- birthdays and Halloweens and July fourth and one day in May when they had first said ‘I love you’. Valentines was never anything to them, other than a kiss in the morning, and maybe a romantic movie at the end of the day. Patty has no right, no right to feel like this today. She got the choice to not celebrate Valentine’s day; Richie didn’t.

“We could go visit him?” Richie suggests, but his voice sticks on the word ‘him’. It’s not Stan, in the ground, not really. Just his body, some earth and a slab of stone.

(At least Stan got a grave. _Eddie_ didn’t.)

They’ve been to visit him plenty of times, but it doesn’t feel right today. Too cliché? Maybe. Patty just doesn’t want to think of the rows of widows who’ll be lining the graveyard today, crouched before graves, backs creaking with the effort. She’s not one of them. She doesn’t fit with them. She shouldn’t be a widow now, she should still be growing old with Stan, he should be in their living room, and there shouldn’t be a man she barely knows living in their spare room.

Richie passes her the mug of coffee and she cups it in her hands. He leans back against the counter, legs crossed, sipping contemplatively. She didn’t know Richie before, and isn’t really sure what’s missing, but there’s definitely something absent. The kitchen is quiet, and he looks uncomfortable with it. Stan always loved the quiet. Patty wonders how the two of them ever fit together. She supposes, the same way her and Stan fit together so perfectly.

Did they? If they did, shouldn’t she have known?

“Did Bill text you?” Richie asks, and when Patty looks up she sees the phone in his grip, and the way he’s frowning

“Why would he? He’s not my friend,” she says, and laughs, mainly just to fill the silence. It’s true; Bill isn’t her friend. She met him once. Met all Stan’s friends, actually. They missed the funeral, so they came a week later, all five of them cramping into their – now just her – small living room. They were nice enough, but it was awkward, the way they all fit together with an ease Patty couldn’t hope to slot into. She’d never met these people, yet they talked of Stan like he was his. Like they could put a claim on him, after missing twenty-seven years of his life. They didn’t even attend the wedding. They didn’t want him life, so they can’t have him in death, Patty had vowed.

She’d gone upstairs, to catch her breath, and found Richie, holding one of Stan’s shirts in his shaky grip. She hadn’t kicked him out, hadn’t asked him why he was trying to take her husband, because he wasn’t. He had the same look as her, overwhelming grief, blame, and he was just trying to understand.

So, instead, she had drawn a breath, and said, “I have some pictures. Of him. Do you want to see them?”

And when he had turned up, a month later, with a suitcase, she hadn’t turned him away then, either.

“He said he was going to,” Richie says, like its simple, shoving the phone back in his pocket without tapping out an answer.

Patty wraps her arms around her waist, setting the cup down on the counter, untouched. “What does he want?”

“Just to make sure we’re not planning each other’s murders,” Richie says, and grins. It’s fake, and forced, painful to see, but it’s a grin nonetheless.

Patty returns it, cheeks aching with the foreign effort. “Tell him no promises.”

* * *

Richie finds her in the study. It’s Stan’s study, full of his stuff, but he’d always insisted it was just The Study. He was like that – open, and not at all private. Patty never thought he’d keep a secret from her.

But he did, and that’s why she’s here alone, curled up in his office chair, reading boring audits because there’s nothing left to read and she has to hear his words or she’ll forget what he sounds like. He wrote her a letter – of course he wrote her a fucking letter – but it’s not him, not really. It’s a version of him that she’s angry at, that she grieves for, that she can’t even picture because he’s not Stan. No, these are his words, black and white, strong and sure. Gentle cursive, underlining, addresses.

The office is a mess. Stan was so ordered, and if he saw the office now he’d pinch at the bridge of his nose and sigh in disappointment but Patty doesn’t care because she would have him here angry if he were just here at all.

The doors open but Richie knocks on the frame, tilting his head a little to the side. Patty turns to look at him in the chair, trying for a smile which even she knows looks pathetic. It’s an invitation though, so Richie slumps inside and lowers himself on to the window sill, the only space not covered in pieces of paper.

“How are you?” Patty asks, because she hasn’t asked yet today. Sometimes she’s so in her own head that she forgets there are two here, mourning.

Richie laughs, hands searching for his pockets and burying themselves there. “Pass.”

She raises an eyebrow, and he laughs again, booming and empty. “Honestly? I’ve been better.”

“Do you want to… talk about?” she asks, reaching out to gather the stray papers. The best she can do is put the mess right. To start to fix everything. To tidy as if Stan is coming back in a hour – Stan isn’t coming back in a hour.

Richie shakes his head, surveying the mess before reaching out for the nearest sheet. “His handwriting was always so fucking neat. I was jealous of that in middle school.”

Patty fingers curl around the edge of the sheets in her grip, edges crinkling slightly. She isn’t sure when her throat got so close, but now it’s hard to swallow, lined with sticky and thick bile. Richie never runs out of stories about Stan when they were kids, and she never runs out of tears.

He reaches out for another sheet, then pulls himself up and gathers an armful from the floor. “What even is this shit?”

“I don’t know,” Patty forces out through the snot and concealed sobs, surprised when a laugh bubbles to the surface. “It’s just… work shit. You were saying you were jealous?”

Richie falters only slightly, fumbling with a few sheets, but he keeps going, sorting them into ordered piles. “I was so fucking jealous. Stan, he had this… master cursive and mine was illegible. But only because I didn’t care. School was so far at the bottom of my radar. Bill was all neat print, like a fucking computer and Eddie-”

He falters, stopping short, throat contracting and barring the words from leaving. Patty doesn’t look up, keeping her eyes down, focusing on the papers in her arms. She neatens her pile and slots it into a drawer. “And Eddie?” she prompts, like it’s nothing, like there aren’t tears stinging at Richie’s eyes, like one simple name hasn’t stopped his heart short.

“Eddie- Eds used to write like he couldn’t write fast enough,” Richie forces out, throat hissing a little with the effort. But once the words are out, they don’t stop, tumbling onwards like a freight train. “You couldn’t read a single fucking word, and I had to transcribe – _me_ – just so he’d get the grades he deserved. He used to run like that too, like he couldn’t run fast enough, like the world ahead would disappear if he didn’t just run towards it.”

“Did he ever get there?” Patty asks, throwing another pile in a drawer and sealing them away from the world. She can’t look at them, can’t see him, so instead she focuses on Eddie, on the way he’s running, on the way he’ll always be running in her mind, and in Richie’s too.

“Get where?” Richie asks, pausing, papers pressed to his chest.

“Where he was running to?”

But there’s no answer for that, and certainly not one anyone in that room knows.

* * *

The day passes like sludge.

She doesn’t cook, because she can’t spend five minutes without her mind wandering somewhere and she doesn’t want to burn the house down. At least, not with Richie in it.

She doesn’t take a bath, even though her mom suggests it when she calls, because she’d rather never see water again then stew in the bathtub, fester in that room with its tinged red walls and its stained tile. She has to take Richie in when she pees, has to stand him by the door, keep an eye on his ribs moving to remind herself that she’s human, that she’s alive.

She doesn’t run, because her ribs already ache with the effort of being awake, and there’s already blood pounding in her eyes from the sheer effort of her body keeping her alive.

As she passes Richie, in search of her own room and its thick syrupy darkness, she pauses. If she were braver, or stronger, or if the two of them were tied together by something other than grief, she would wind her arms around his neck and press a kiss to his cheek. Now, all she notices is the lines etched into his forehead, and the way his shoulders slump forward like a downward incline. Patty can’t remember the last time she saw him cry, but the pain is written into his skin, down to the dirt caked under his nail. She wishes she could reach across; the same way he does for her. Ask more about his childhood, not to selfishly hoard all she can about Stan, but to learn about Eddie, about everything, about why there’s a brokenness to the way he stands, or why he’s here.

But she’s weak, and selfish, and tired to her bones, so instead she smiles thinly and says, “sleep well.”

He replies with a nod, curt and polite, stepping into the close darkness of his room, letting it devour him.

Leaving the door open, so Patty can slip through again, in the middle of the night.

Their own little routine.

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be up for Valentine's day but I completely forgot about it sat in my drafts!! Title taken from Soon You'll Get Better by Taylor Swift. I really love Patty, so this is me trying to do her grieving process justice + bonus Richie because I didn't want her to be alone and I love their friendship. I tagged this with their ship too, as it could be read either way.
> 
> Thank you for reading!! Sorry for the late festive fic!!


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